Multiethnic Literatures in the U.S.

After reading “Parable of the Sower”, I was heartbroken. I became disgusted with the world around me as Octavia Butler exposed me to the ugly truths that I was all too familiar with: racism still exists and it is worse than ever, the middle class are becoming poor, the environment is going to hell, drug addiction is out of control, and the worst part is that society will just ignore all these problems until they blow up in our faces with chaos and anarchy taking over, just like they did in Butler’s novel.
Butler gives us various hopeful situations to solving these problems. Unfortunately, every single one she slowly crushes and kills. Butler introduces us to Lauren, a character with hyperempathy. Such a unique disease of feeling others’ pain that one quickly wonders what the world would be like if everyone had such a disorder. Would there be peace on earth? Hell no. Butler destroys this dream of any good coming from this disorder by showing that we’d be helpless in helping each other or better yet, we’d kill all those in pain just so we wouldn’t have to suffer. People with broken bones would quickly be executed to save the suffering we’d have to endure. Maybe this is Butler’s way of saying that society can’t just understand or feel the pain of those who are suffering. That would do no good. By helping others people would have to face their agony. So instead people just try to hide from others’ misery.
Through Lauren, the reader also gets the hope of a girl determined not ignore society’s problems but instead face them head on with the idea of changing the world into a better place. Our wish that Lauren can change the world is also killed by Butler. She makes our hope in Lauren change into disgust as Butler changes Lauren into a cross-dressing religious extremist that slowly begins to justify killing and stealing in her philosophy of change. Her obsession with her father and sleeping with someone who reminds her of her father and is her father’s age is not to pleasant either.
Even the hope of educating others to these problems is shattered by Butler. In the book people don’t even want to know about societies’ problems but instead want to live inside their walled communities. When Lauren tries to educate her community of the terrors of the outside and being prepared, she is just ignored and even punished for scaring people. It’s as if Butler is telling us that there are all these horrible things in our society and there is nothing we can do about it because people don’t want to do anything about it. We can’t make a philosophy for everyone to follow, we can’t just try to feel others’ pain that their in, we can’t fight racism because it’s unidentifiable, and we can’t really educate those who just want to live inside their little “bubbles”, so what can we do? Butler succeeds in ripping out our little hearts and leaving us to bleed to death. Hopefully our hearts are mended a little in Butler’s sequel by giving us a little hope in mankind.

In the novel, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, the characters and other inhabitants of the future United States face an all too familiar world of little access to essential resources. This world in which it is difficult to obtain an income, food, and adequate medical care is not all that foreign if compared to today’s society. Today, those who are not on the top of the social class hierarchy deal with limited access almost daily. They fight to obtain a job in which will pay enough for them to get out of debt, they struggle to obtain healthy foods (without having to travel long distances), and they attempt to gain adequate and affordable healthcare and justice. This is exactly the picture that Butler paints in her novel, except that instead of only affecting the poor, it sweeps the country on a large scale, making a full life even more difficult to obtain.

            One of the first and most obvious things that the characters in Butler’s world do not have is access to money. The only money they are able to obtain is by either stealing or by taking money from the dead. If any characters are able to hold a job, it usually does not pay enough for them to support a family or to buy necessities to live on. Butler writes, “Wages – surprise! Were never enough to pay the bills” (288). Even when people were able to earn some type of wages, they couldn’t afford water and food. These kinds of occurrences are strikingly familiar to today’s world. Jobs that pay a low salary never quite get people out of debt. They also leave people with a low amount of money to buy food. Another similarity between this fantasy world and our current one is the distance people are made to travel to obtain food. Butler’s characters cannot find adequate stores that sell food and clothing at affordable prices. This is not a far off idea if the poorer areas of cities today are closely examined. People must travel further distances in order to buy the things they need, much like the people in Butler’s world. This problem of access to resources is what sets classes apart from each other in today’s society, and unfortunately, in Butler’s world, this lack of access is what keeps Lauren and her followers on the streets.

            In addition to not having access to money and proper food, the characters in Butler’s world do not have access to medical care or to the criminal justice system. Doctors and hospitals are long gone and the people are left to either not receive medical care, or to simply make due with that they have. Along with no medical care, these people cannot depend on the police for assistance. Often the police charge outrageous prices for routine investigations or worse, they don’t respond to a call for days. Again, while these situations might seem shocking to think about, they are going on in the world today. In poor areas of the city, police many times are slow to respond; if they respond at all. With Bankole’s situation, Butler writes, “The deputies all but ignored Bankole’s story and his questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing.” (316). In this instance, the police didn’t even give Bankole a chance – they had their minds made up that he was a criminal. In the end, the lack of available resources is the community’s downfall. Because of the unavailability of water, food, money, and medical needs, they are left fending for themselves. They steal and share, make their own food, and try the best they can to survive under the less than perfect conditions that now make up their lives, just like some people do in today’s world.